Hi all, here's a Saturday dev update! First up a screen shot of Reprisal running in a HD 720 mode - New icy level tile set.

The screen shot also shows the new ‘land’ manna cost indicator. What you cant see in a still screen is that all the populants animations are now 8 frames, double what they are in the current version.

Oh and the actual grid area of the land has been increased slightly giving you more of a view than in the current version :D

This info was also posted in the forum this week but as an overview here's what else has been happening:

The game's logic has been flipped! After reading a lot of feed back and sitting down with numbers I've changed how buildings create populants.

The new logic makes populants quicker with smaller settlements, but they are weaker. Bigger settlements make populants slower but they are stronger. This leads to a different strategy, either make lots of small settlements to increase you population fast - but it will be weak. Or build bigger settlements to make a stronger tribe.

Populants now bump merge. This means if two populants are close to each other or bump into each other they will merge to create a combined stronger populant.

Populants are now smarter. There were a bit dumb so have beefed up their AI to help them settle better. I'll continue to improve this over the dev.

Terraforming now has a new manna cost system. Lower land will be cheaper to effect, with higher land being more costly. This feels good as it starts to prevent spamming. As a player you will start to have to think should you save manna for totem powers to disrupt other tribes population generation or expand.

Have also begun work on adding 'unmovable' bedrock that can not be removed. UI for a new totem branch has been added. There have also been lot's of fixes to AI. Work is also underway to rewrite CPU logic and aggression. Lots of CPU kindness has been sprinkled to reduce CPU overheads which again is good news.

Just beat the game after a couple days at it. I was surprized how much there was to this deceivingly simple looking game. After quickly beating the first few levels quickly without a hitch it suddenly got way more involved, sometimes finding that if i looked away for too long i would lose my lead and the game would start slipping from me, and other times i would leave the game on and walk out of the room and find that i had won. The most interesting games i found however were the ones that lasted for hours without any input from me, growing and changing like a petri dish. Seriously, i can't tell you how excited i am to be able to play a more polished version of the game. Best in browser flash game i've ever played. Cheers